“Modern antibiotics are very effective in treating many of these, resulting in a better outcome for patients.

“However, we have to balance prescribing with our understanding of the possible effects of long-term antibiotic use and the links with acquired infections such as C. difficile.

“This is increasingly an issue across health and social services for practitioners in all health care settings.

“The rate of new infections is falling. Using a root cause analysis approach for each new case we can say that there is considerably less transmission of the infection within Trust hospitals; that our infection prevention, control and isolation procedures are working.

– – –

If they had eliminated cases of C-Diff – then they would have proof.

If they were drawing Process Behavior Charts and showing statistically significant declines (outside the process limits) on the Interval Process Behavior Chart for each hospital that had performed a root cause analysis and implemented corrective actions, then that would be proof.

If they were proactive and took the lessons learned from several hospitals and shared them across the Trust to have a statistically significant run of zero infections at MULTIPLE hospitals, then I would say they are really doing good root cause analysis.

But 23 cases one month and 19 the next? Hardly proof.

To read more about performance measures and using statistics to measure true improvement, see Chapter 5 of the new TapRooT® Book.